Overcome
by Remy2
Summary: Love breeds internal demons; Spike thinks too much. B/S Future-fic. Winner of a Watching You Award, Nov. 2001.


TITLE: Overcome   
AUTHOR: Remy A. (remyallegory@yahoo.com)   
RATING: PG13   
SPOILERS: None, unless you're *way* out of the loop.   
CATEGORY: B/S; Future-fic   
SUMMARY: Love breeds internal demons. Spike thinks too much.   
FEEDBACK: I'm one of those sad people who have to fish for compliments. This is me fishing.   
DISCLAIMER: Count von Whedon is *the man*, man. Quote is from a song by Tantric. And I think there's a line I unconsciously ripped off a Jimmy Eat World song -- if so, that, too, belongs to someone who is Not Me.   
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This started out as a long story about bad marriage and expectations and miscommunication and horrible stuff like that, but I tend to drift. Spike is human; I don't explain how -- surprise yourself. Blame Anita Shreve and her book "Eden Close" for originally inspiring this lit'l ditty. I tried to make it happy in spite of...well, *the plot*...don't know how close I got.   
  
  
OVERCOME   
"In the mourning / I can see the sights / No wonder I could / Never keep you satisfied / In   
the mourning / I can see inside / Myself and all the things / That you were trying to hide."   
  
  
Up on the bare hill she closes her eyes. Her fingers are wrapped neatly in his, their shoulders and ankles barely touching. He keeps his eyes open; he watches the clouds and he contemplates his confusion as he always does. He is jealous of the content sighs that escape her lips as she watches the world through heavy eyelids. She smiles when her eyes are closed, and perhaps, he thinks to himself, that is the only time she feels truly okay.   
  
She is okay on the bare hill, with dead, hard grass, her body facing upwards, to that place she once visited, to that place she sees only behind black curtains, to that place that she can only reach in sleep.   
  
And he is envious.   
  
Of the shade that envelopes her and the tiny role he plays in her life -- that role of comfort and acceptance, of offered love. He is jealous because he isn't enough, enough to remind her of what she so desperately wants in the small corners of her self, because he is only one man and because his skin is warm and his hands are large and overbearing.   
  
She opens her eyes. They are glossy and unfocused. "What's wrong," he wants to ask, but he will not, because he knows she will answer, "Nothing," and because he knows it's more than that, he knows what it is. And he knows there are a lot of things he cannot fix, so he will not even try.   
  
- - - -   
  
She nicks her leg with the razor. Dark blood pools on the thick of her thigh. He has a momentary urge to kneel before her and lick it off.   
  
There are some things he fears he will never get used to. The rubbery-numbness of his legs when he's sat still for too long; the ironically unnatural feel of cold skin (Dawn's hands in the dark, Her cheeks in the morning, his feet under the sheets at night); the bright yellow light of the sun, too bright for his liking; the way his heart pulses through his stomach when he lies real still, so thick and loud and monotonous, like a drum that will never stop.   
  
She holds her leg under the warm tap until the bleeding stops.   
  
He closes the medicine cabinet and watches the mirror -- not really himself in it (because that he will never get used to, either) -- just...watching...the way the steam from the bath fogs his reflection, as he fights the urge to wipe it clean with his palm; how short she is when she stands, her pale form discolored by the green tiles of the wall; the slight smile she holds as she wraps her arms around his torso and hooks her chin on her shoulder.   
  
"Your roots are showing," she says.   
  
He needs a haircut. The thick curls fall over his forehead, nearly covering his eyebrows, and it reminds him of the neighbors' dog, the dog that can't play catch because he can't see through a blanket of hair.   
  
She runs her hand over his scalp, from the jagged hairline below his ears to the heavy, uneven ends near his eyes. She tried to cut it, once.   
  
He doesn't think he will bleach it this time. He will get it cut, but he thinks maybe he should let it color itself. It's brown, if he remembers correctly. Besides, his body is almost thirty, now -- it will never be twenty-four again, and again. He is growing old -- too old, he thinks, for bleached hair.   
  
"Yeah..."   
  
And perhaps he is too old for the mass quantities of hair gel, also. But she does not mind the hair gel. It has a distinctive scent, a comfortable scent, one that has lingered since the first time she invited him into her bed, since before then. It is something she has memorized, and, therefore, it cannot be bad.   
  
He hates these changes. The way she's always sleepy or melancholy, the way he has to breathe and eat and worry, the way his hair is different and the fact that she made him quit smoking, because cigarettes "are a carcinogen; they'll give you cancer."   
  
The smoking he didn't mind so much, however. He is going to die now, and if so, he wants it to be at the hands of a monster, the kind of monster he was once, and maybe sometimes still is. Poetic justice or something like that. He drinks less these days; he wants to go down fighting.   
  
- - - -   
  
He does not know if it's possible. He runs his fingers over the flat of her stomach, skating in and around her bellybutton, over the tiny curves and small prickly hairs.   
  
"Do you think we..."   
  
She shrugs and says, "I don't know," (and, a little later, after they have eaten and she has given it some thought, she declares: "Why couldn't we?") and he doesn't even bother to finish his thought, because she has already done it for him.   
  
"I mean...if so...would you?"   
  
"Don't ask stupid questions."   
  
"There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers."   
  
He waits; she doesn't answer. He forgets he asked and concentrates, instead, on memorizing every camber of her midsection with his mouth. He can see her so clearly when he closes his eyes.   
  
- - - -   
  
She wore a white dress, as one would suspect. It wasn't very elaborate. He even wore a tuxedo, despite that it itched, and he still doesn't understand why any man would opt for tying a bow-tie when god invented clip-ons.   
  
He runs, down to the end of Revello Drive, then he turns left and keeps going until he comes to the woods, where he stops to catch his breath before plunging into the thick brush.   
  
She hardly smiled at all throughout the whole procession, but she said, "I do," when she was supposed to and when she kissed him, he felt her fingernails digging into his arm, breaking skin despite the layers of Armani, and, hell, he can't deny that that night was one the best nights of his entire existence.   
  
Faster and faster he runs, leaping over logs and ducking tree limbs and snapping stray sticks until he is at the end again. He stands on the side of the road and watches the highway leading out of Sunnydale.   
  
He hardly thinks about the wedding, though. Only when she pulls out the photo album while looking for lost weapons or old bottles of nail polish, laying it on the shaggy tan carpet of their bedroom floor, before putting it back in the drawer without giving it a second thought. Or, sometimes, when she fingers the ring. She has this horrible habit of playing with it; she's lost it more than once.   
  
He kicks the sign that says "Come Back Soon." His foot hurts now, but he waits. One...two...three cars speed by. Three families are leaving. He watches the cars go, never once expecting any of them to turn around; that'd be a silly thing to do.   
  
Sometimes he thinks maybe he should have left -- or, rather, stayed away. Sometimes he thinks that perhaps it's not too late.   
  
He turns and runs all the way home.   
  
- - - -   
  
She opens her eyes. They are glossy and unfocused. "What's wrong," he wants to ask, but he will not, because even if she were to tell him, perhaps even make him understand, there is nothing else he can give. Nothing he hasn't already tested twice, nothing he hasn't already tried.   
  
Sometimes, for moments so brief he doesn't even realize he's done lost himself and found himself again, he wonders if she loves him at all.   
  
Then he figures it shouldn't matter, and so he decides that it doesn't. He will love her and do nothing else, and when that becomes too little, then he will fall over and die, and maybe he will take her with him.   
  
He pulls his hand from hers and rests it on his belly, adding just enough pressure with his palm and wrist to keep the *thu-thump* of his pulse from driving him insane.   
  
She turns her body to face him, her head resting on the palm of her hand and the weight of her left arm. He looks at her, suspecting she has something important to say. The hand that was lazily placed on her hip finds its way to his stomach, resting next to his, and she lays her head down on the hard ground, nestled into the crook of his neck.   
  
"Spike?"   
"Yeah?"   
"I love you..."   
"I know."   
"...You know that, right?"   
  
He decided once, a long time ago, that she came back psychic; she won't admit to it.   
  
"Yeah."   
"Good, because..."   
"What?"   
"...I just...I want you to understand that I do...even if..." (it doesn't feel like it?)   
  
He doesn't *really* understand, but that, he believes, is not the point.   
  
"Yeah. I know."   
  
Then he lays back and closes *his* eyes, for once, letting himself drown in the brown grass and the bright sun and the thick air. He'll give it a moment, pretend he doesn't care -- about anything, like her. And he smiles as he realizes the black isn't really black at all. He feels her body next to his, senses the shifting of her legs as she scratches one foot with the other.   
  
He smiles again, because he finally sees what she sees, and he thinks, perhaps, that it's not that bad all.   
  
- - - -   
  
Then she is over him, with her hands worming their way under his shirt and her mouth on his. A hunger rolls off her in waves, the kind of desperation he barely remembers. He kisses her back and holds her close, all the while pushing her away.   
  
"Do you still feel them?" she asks, her lips barely touching his and her fingers pulling at the thick clumps of his hair.   
  
"What?"   
  
"The butterflies?"   
  
"Always," he answers without hesitation. They're eating him alive.   
  
She pulls back as her eyes widen slightly and her lips form a goofy grin -- when was the last time she smiled like that? He can't remember. This whole situation is very strange. Has she finally figured it out? Has it really taken her this long?   
  
He pulls at her neck, bringing her mouth back down to his while she eagerly complies, and he shrugs.   
  
Better late than never.   
  
  
THE END   
10/28/01 - 11/7/01 


End file.
